Call Start: 03:00 January 1, 0000 3:35 AM ET

Aker Solutions ASA (OTC:AKRTF)

Kjetel Digre – Chief Executive Officer

Marianne Hagen – Head of Sustainability, HSSE and Communications

Idar Eikrem – Chief Financial Officer

Hello, and a warm welcome to Arker Solutions on the presentation of the First Quarter Results for 2022. My name is Marianne Hagen, Head of Sustainability, HSSE and Communications. With me here today is our CEO, Kjetel Digre, and our CFO, Idar Eikrem. They will take you through the main developments of the quarter. Our presentation today is a live audiocast and you can download the slides from our web page. The audiocast would later today be made available for replay. After the presentation, we do have time for some questions. Those of you who are following the audiocast can submit your questions on the online platform. And with that, I'll leave the floor to you, Kjetel.

Thank you, Marianne, and welcome to everyone on the line. Let me take you through the highlights of the quarter. The overall message is that we delivered another quarter of solid performance and we continue to deliver on our strategy. Firstly, our financial results demonstrate that we are on track with our targets. Our first quarter revenue was 8.3 billion kroner and EBITDA was 583 million, excluding special items, with the margin of 7%. We delivered 7 billion of order intake or just below one times book-to-bill.

We continue to see high feed and tendering activity and expect several large projects to be sanctioned towards [Indiscernible]. Our backlog ended at 48 billion, providing a solid foundation for our growth targets moving forward. Secondly, we are progressing well with our transition journey. We have an ongoing recruitment campaign. We have this quarter welcome more than 500 skilled new colleagues, and we are on track with our target of hiring 2,000 new colleagues in 2022.

During the quarter, we also announced that we are further strengthening our renewable portfolio with the acquisition of Rainpower, a leading hydro-power technology company. The company develops and produces hydro-power turbines, control systems, and associated equipment for customers worldwide. It delivers equipment for new hydro-power plants and performs upgrades of the existing ones. We see strong industrial synergies by integrating Rain power into Aker solutions to further develop the company in innovative technology company, to optimize hydro-power developments and operations.

The increasing needs for renewable electricity combined with aging hydro power infrastructure are protected to lead to increased in [Indiscernible] in the hydro-power industry moving forward. And this is being further amplified by the recently increased focus on Analyst security in Europe. We believe rain Power is well-positioned to capture growth in this market. As you know, Aker solutions is the most experienced EPCI contractor in delivering of concrete structures. During the quarter, our participation in the European research project, and they're treat were successfully completed up to four years of research and innovation.

Concrete is the most used construction material in the world, hence, the need to tackle emissions and the target of EnDurCrete was to develop an Eco-friendly and durable concretes for different applications, including offshore. As part of this international research projects, we have developed and tested new innovative concretes. Please add-on storage yard in Norway. Demonstrating promising results in the pursuit of sustainable low carbon concrete solutions for, -- for applications.

And in addition, by combining concrete production with carbon capture like you are already doing at Newsome in cooperation with several partners. We reduce emissions in significant ways. Thirdly, in terms of recent developments, we continue to see increased market activity. As we look ahead to the rest of 2022, we see a favorable oil and gas price backdrop, but also a dynamic operating environment. On the macro level, the pandemic and the tragic Russian invasion of Ukraine have amplified several trends. This includes increased inflation, raw material prices, and global supply chain constraints. We support the sanctions enacted by the European Union and the international community.

And we have no backlog in Russia and Aker Solutions will not start any new projects in Russia. When it comes to supply chain constraints, we're not immune to these market dislocations. And we see some signs that locking in prices of certain raw materials in the market is currently somewhat more challenging than a few months ago. Despite the market challenges, we are optimistic on the outlook in general, and we closely monitor the supply chain situations in order to be proactive. On the other hand, we also see that the energy landscape has evolved significantly over the last couple of months. And that geopolitical events have led to an increased focus on energy security.

This is projected to lead to increased investment in both oil and gas and renewables. In the near-term, it is likely to result in increased demand for Subsea tieback developments at existing infrastructure, to enable maintained or increased production at existing fields. And our industry-leading Subsea gas compression solutions are also well-positioned for this type of demand and activity. Now let's have a look at some of our recent operational highlights. Overall, I'm pleased to see that our main projects are progressing well. Following years of extensive upgrades, we delivered the new world aid drilling and production platform to occur in March.

Following the contract award in 2017, we have carried out significant upgrades and refurbishment of the cut form to extend its lifetime for another 20 years of production. Refurbishment project is never easy, especially at this size and complexity. Knowing that the project was carried out during the pandemic makes me even more proud that we reached this important milestone. The fun part of our job is to assist the hiccup offshore during the installation phase and the platform is planned to start production in the fourth quarter of this year. After the [Indiscernible] by projects a big milestone was reached when the whole of the FPSO arrived at our store yard from Singapore in April.

And two weeks ago, together with our customer [Indiscernible] I visited our yard to review the project and we also boarded the launch an impressive whole of FPSO, which is midstream more than 300 meters long with a dead weight of 66,000 tons. And that's before we now start to lift on board and install the 25,000 tons of modules that we have constructed over the past few years. The total consists of three large parts, as you can see in the picture on the slide was manufactured in Dubai. It is currently being lifted in place and installed by the world's largest lifting vessels Sleipnir operated by Heerema. In our Subsea segment, the work also continues to progress well.

During the quarter, all the Subsea template for the [Indiscernible] project were installed successfully according to plan. We also reached another important milestone on the Subsea part of [Indiscernible] when the second batch of five standardized subsidiaries were completed in manufacturing in Brazil and has now arrived in Norway. These are part of the portfolio standardized subsidiaries that we are delivering to different customers across several key developments contributing to healthy margins in our Subsea segment. In our renewables and the energy transition portfolio, we also continued to make good progress during the quarter.

For the Carbon Storage Project, Northern Lights, the assembly or the first subsidiary for CO2 injections started in Brazil and the construction of the [Indiscernible] but is progressing well at our Egersund yard. This is a great example of how we can directly transfer existing competence and solutions from oil and gas over to renewables projects. Our scope, at the onshore receiving terminal on the west coast of Norway [Indiscernible] quarter. The majority of the detail design is now completed and the civil construction work is progressing according to plan.

During the quarter, it was also encouraging to see that the EU approved the funding for expanding the capacity at this important CO2 storage project. This will accommodate additional demand and enable new industrial clusters across the year to store it's captured CO2 at Northern Lights. And it means that we are in good position for further call-offs on the Northern Lights project for the world's largest off-shore floating wind project, Equinor's Hywind Tampen, we have now completed the concrete costing of all the 11 floating foundations. These floating concrete foundations are more than 100 meters tall. Again, it makes me proud that our team has carried out this complex and challenging work in the middle of a global pandemic. During the quarter, we also delivered all the 1969 acres for the projects, manufactured at our yard in Renault.

These structures are used to connect the mowing lines to the floating offshore wind turbines. And this is another example where we're using our strong oil and gas competence and transferring this directly to renewables projects. The floating foundations are now being towed to the goodness assembly side further up the cost where the towers and wind turbines will be installed, which is outside our scope. After this, they will be transported by tugboat out to the field in the North Sea, where we will support the hookup and commissioning and first power is expected this fall. On the sunrise wind project, the first steel was cut on 14th of February. This took place at the Dahlman, Mongolia yard in Romania, which is our subcontractor for the fabrication of the topside modules.

This yard is one of the largest in Europe and reflects our international delivery model, where we complement our reaching yards. Once these topside modules are manufactured, they will be shipped to our store, Drydal, Norway for final assembly. With the main jacket produced at our Vartdal yard, the assembly process will be completed with our partners Siemens Energy, before transporting to the U.S. When installed, this will be the first ever off shore HVDC platform in U.S. waters. Within decommissioning, our work is also progressing well. During the spring, all seas builded levers several large structures from the Gida, Valhall and [Indiscernible] to our store yard ready to be dismantled and recycled.

In total these way more than a massive 50,000 metric tons. Now target is to recycle 98% of the steel and materials supporting the circular economy. Let’s now have a quick look at our main orders during the quarter. We continued to win important contracts and feeds. Two of the largest contracts this quarter were in the E and M segment, variable large, multi-year extensions of frame agreements with economic and Nokia. Securing capacity through long-term extension commitments like this demonstrates the value we deliver to customers and the quality of our deliveries. During the quarter, we also secured a letter intent from Scipen for delivery of the umbilicals for the ENI's following development of further Ivory Coast. In terms of our early phase work, we won 38 new phone contracts in the first quarter.

30% of these are related to renewables and analyst transition work. And several large projects related to the expected particularly N CS activity are currently in FEED phase. We also won important feed contracts related to e-commerce, rolls back development which is one of the largest undeveloped FEEDs in the UK. One of the FEEDs is related to the EPC of the FPSO and the other is for the Subsea production system and umbilicals part of this large FEED development. And as mentioned earlier, we expect higher order intake in the second half of 2022. And because of that, we continue to see a potential for a record-high order intake this year and into next year.

Now, let's move to the tender pipeline and market outlook. The overall comment is that our tendering activity remains high across all segments. And the outlook is positive. Our tender value remains stable at $80 billion and close to 20% of this is related to energy transition business. These are tenders that could be awarded in the market over the next 12 to 18 months. Looking ahead, we have increased confidence in our view of robust loyalty air market growth with increased activity across areas where we are highly relevant. On the macro level, there is a tight supply and demand balance driven in part by under investment in recent years. And now further amplified by the situation in Europe.

This is projected to lead to a substantial step-up in capital spending moving forward. In addition, significant growth is expected on the answers related to the deadline for our customers to submit plans for new field developments and progress at the end of this year. The energy markets and our customers budgets also continue to evolve over time. As a result, we remain committed to our strategy and transition journey. And this all supports our target to grow our revenue by 10% annually on average, towards 2025, with an increasing share from renewables and energy transition work. Now, to sum up, we delivered another solid quarter. I'm pleased with our performance and looking ahead, Aker Solutions is well-positioned.

We continue to see high oil and gas prices and a dynamic operating environment. We expect global oil and gas supply to remain constrained in the coming years and securing sufficient supply of affordable energy to people and society will remain an important priority. We expect this to lead to continued high commodity prices as well as multiple years of spending growth from our customers across areas where we can contribute with our solutions and expertise. We will also continue to monitor the supply chain situation proactively as we move forward. Overall, Arker Solutions will play an important part in both the ongoing near-term recovery and for the longer-term structural changes in the energy markets.

We expect increased project sanctioning moving forward in regions and segments where we have a strong position supporting our long-term growth targets. The energy transition is a massive undertaking that will require working across industries and working in partnerships to succeed. We need to provide affordable, stable, energy, people and society need today. And we need to work together to build new energy systems. At Arker Solutions, we have the people, the competence, and the drive to take a leading role. We will continue to work closely with our customers and partners to deliver solutions that will help solve global energy challenges for future generations. And with that, I will hand it over to Idar, who will take you through the numbers in more detail.

Thank you, Kjetel. I will now take you through the key financial of the first quarter our segment performance and run through our financial guidance. As always, all numbers are mentioned are in Norwegian kroner. So let me start with the income statement. The first quarter revenue was 8.3 billion up from 6.5 billion a year ago. This was driven by the Subsea and EAM segments. As we continue to progress on our project portfolio. The underlying EBITDA was $583 million up from $427 million a year ago. And the margin increased to 7%. This was supported by continued good performance and strong margins in Subsea.

The underlying EBITDA -- not the underlying EBIT was $316 million up from a $168 million a year ago. We ended the quarter with a net income, excluding special items of $200 million and earnings per share of 0.39 kroner. Now, moving to our balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter with a positive working capital development, it improved by 1 billion during the quarter. The main driver for the improvement was the continued increase progress on some of our larger Subsea project, triggering milestones and prepayments from customers. Cash flow from operation was 1.6 billion in the quarter. In addition to EBITDA, this was positively impacted by the improvement in working capital.

Aker cash flow from investing activities was minus 147 million in the quarter. In addition to normal CapEx, this included the acquisition of Unitech Power Systems that we announced earlier this year. And it also included a small acquisition related to our existing decomm yard on the West Coast of Norway. During the quarter, we bought back 460 million of the bond maturing in 2022 and 20 million of the bond maturing in 2024 and we ended the quarter with a strong financial position. The net cash position was 3.3 billion, with a leverage ratio of minus 2.3 times. Our total liquidity buffer was 10.2 billion, where 5.2 billion was cash. Now over to the segments. For renewables and field development, the first quarter revenue was 2.8 billion, similar to the same period last year. The underlying EBITDA was 102 million with a margin of 3.6% as several projects are in early phase of execution.

As a reminder, the margin in the comparable quarter last year had a positive one-off effect from arbitration ruling. The order intake was NOK1.5 billion or 0.6 times book-to-bill. We continue to expect order intake in this segment to be lumpy and likely more weighted toward second half of this year and into 2023. The revenue in the segment is expected to increase in 2022 as we gradually increase the progress on recent awards. The tendering activity is high, both related to the NCS and related to renewable projects internationally. For the EMM segment, the first quarter revenue was NOK2.5 billion. This was up from NOK1.9 billion a year ago, driven by continued good progress on ongoing work. The underlying EBITDA was NOK140 million with a margin of 5.6% up from 4.1% a year earlier.

The order intake was NOK4.5 billion or 1.8 times book-to-bill. This was mainly driven by large multi-year extension of long-term frame agreements. And the backlog remains strong at NOK19.3 billion. The revenue in this segment is expected to increase slightly in 2022, and in line with current activity levels. In the Subsea segment, the first quarter revenue was NOK3 billion. This was up from NOK1.9 billion a year ago driven by increased progress on recent awards. The underlying EBITDA was strong at NOK429 million with a margin of 14.4%.

This was driven by solid performance on ongoing projects, where we see positive effects from our portfolio approach in the execution with a strong focus on standardization. We continue to see margins in the 12% to 15% range moving forward. The order intake was $1.1 billion or 0.4 times book-to-bill, and we continue to expect order intake in this segments to be lumpy and likely more weighted towards the second half of 2022 and into 2023. And the backlog remains strong at $16.1 billion. The revenue in Subsea is expected to increase in 2022 as we continue to progress on recent awarded work and the coming three quarters will likely have higher activity levels than in the first quarter. The subsidy segment continues to experience high demand and high tendering activity.

In particular, on the Norwegian Continental Shelf in Brazil and with our focused approach in other active regions globally. Now over to order intake and backlog. In the First quarter, we delivered an order intake of $7 billion or 0.9 times book-to-go. our backlog is currently $48 billion and provides a solid foundation moving forward. The share of our order book from work related to renewables and energy transition is now at 33%, up from 18% last year and 7% the year before that. This demonstrates that our transition journey is on track. Now, to sum up, in the first quarter, we continue to deliver a solid financial and operational performance, and we continue on track with our targets for revenue growth and cash generation.

Based on our secured backlog. And the expected market activity we continue to see our full-year revenue up by more than 20% in 2022. At this stage, we continue to expect our EBITDA margins to gradually improve and be up in 2022 compared to the 2021 level. The outlook for project sanctioning is very positive and Aker Solution is in a good position to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. Thank you for listening. That was the end of our presentation, and we will now open up for questions.

Thank you Idar and thank you Kjetel and we have received one question at the outset of this meeting from [Indiscernible], and he says, congratulations on good set of results, and we say thank you. The higher backlog coverage, especially for 2022, seems high versus historical level, so no change in the 22 revenue guidance looks to be conservative. Would you agree, or do you see the awards in 2022 to be simply for execution in later years?

I'd also like to say thank you, and I'll bring it on to the rest of the organization. But the first question there, I guess you can.

I can do that, this is the reason why we are very confident when we're saying that our activity level and revenue will be more than 20% increase from the 2021 level. And the risks and sort of development continue that we are even more confident about that today than when we announced this in the beginning of the year.

Thank you. and then before I go to the second part of the question, I remind all of you that you can submit your questions on our online platform. To the second part of the question from Nick is on the supply chain given to the volatility in commodity prices. Are you seeing any delays in awards due to this, especially in the oil and gas projects and offshore wind projects? How are you managing these risks in your tendering pipeline?

First of all, I would say that we don't see any specific trend that this causes delays. It's a key topic in relations to a lot of clients and customers. It's also a key topic when we're working with our long-term partners on the sub contracting side. But no trend of delays and I will rather say that's the end of the security issue that has come high up on the agenda. Actually, I would say cement plans and rather accelerate some of them within particular oil and gas. And then to the way we are handling it, that's a huge topic.

We've said in the beginning that this is something that we are working constantly with, monitoring it together with clients and our partners and then taking proactive action with listing all the organizations we're in close collaboration with very constructive clients. That's the way of handling such changes and challenges. And then to more specific ways of handing it, we are making sure that we are taking it as a topic in the bid processes to try to lock in committed prices for vendors and also have the right escalation clauses in the contracts. And we're also done looking at both locking and hedging as much as possible before we enter into the actual contracts.

As I said, the clients see the picture moving and they're really sort of constructive across the board. I would also like to highlight that particularly our standardized deliveries within Subsea is creating opportunities to be even more proactive and then stocking opportunities is there because of the way these are standardized deliveries across several products.

Just add to that there are two elements, of course, when it comes to projects under execution, we don't see any hiccups so when it comes to that it's more of when we are into bidding for new projects and in our dialogue with clients, as we said, we are often in the FEEDs phase before we are getting into the EPCI phase and in closed dialog with the client, we will do our best in order to secure prices going forward, but also with our update in prices after the feed phase have been concluded. So this is constructive dialogue that we have with our customers, but it's on top of our agenda due to the situation in the supply chain market.

Thank you. And then the next question is from [Indiscernible]. And he says, how do you see working capital development through the year? What should be a normalized working capital level in the context of increased activity level for the coming years?

Working capital, we, as some of you will have the noticed already, we have updated our guidance and we have said that there should be expected to fluctuate between minus 2.5 and minus NOK1 billion so it's a healthy level for working capital for us. We have been able to improve it gradually over the last few quarters. And going forward, that type of range is what we believe in in the next, let's say one to two years from now. And then short-term we should be a bit closer to the upper range, meaning the minus 2.5 and the lower range of minus one.

Thank you. And then the next question is from James Vinchester and he says, "Hi. Could you provide some color on margin progression throughout the year and for each division? Which projects are going to help drive this especially, is there anything one-off in subsidization that helps this quarter? If not, with strong revenue growth and fixed cost observation, why should you not maintain margins at the top end of the range?

Yeah, what we have guided on the Subsea part is maintaining our guidance that we provided in the third quarter of last year as well when we had our presentation at that time with the -- in range of 12% to 15%. And this quarter it was 14.4%. So this could fluctuate from one quarter to another depending on the project portfolio and the progress on the various projects. So the overall margin for the company we have said that we will deliver somewhat higher margin this year in totality than what we did last year. And that you can also read out of the first quarter report where we delivered 7% EBITDA margin.

The second part of the question is, can you discuss how you expect the project pipeline to materialize into FIDs throughout the rest of the year and into 2023. Looking at the rista chart, it seems you expect the majority of the FIDs to happen in 2023.

I think generally, the tenders that we're involved in it's happening throughout the whole year. But then we have a very special case in Norway and with the temporary tax relief package, which had some March through them by the end of this year to file -- take their FIDs and file a PDOs. We are working with our key clients in, in Norway on projects that are relay solid. So my expectation is that these are FIDs will commerce plan than we are maturing the fees as we speak. And then I guess it's a matter of how these products will ramp up when it comes to both activity and revenue. Starting off by the FID and then moving ahead into the first half of 2023 and they will see some variations on pace. So picking up activity.

I agree to that. And due to the sort of special case with this activity package in Norway and with a plan for development to be submitted by end of this year, we expect that first half 23 will also be good year order intake wise for us.

And the next question is related in some Haakon Amundsen and good morning to you. Do you lock-on and [Indiscernible] Given that it's more difficult to fixed prices for new projects due to the supply chain issues, what is the risk of slow decision-making by clients. Is it fair to assume that the Norwegian tax system will lead these contracts to be rewarded regardless, question mark?

We don't see a trend yet. I think that the reference to the Norwegian activity has been on level comments is relevant, that creates some secure unpredictability. The way that we explained how we work with clients in over with an open dialogue, proactively taking measures to control this, both in relation to the client, but also in relation to our long-term partners on subcontractors also adds to that security and predictability. So going forward, it's obviously this could develop the Front-Lit, but just now we I think we see that it's fairly stable.

Then next question is from [Indiscernible] and he said, "You have been buying back bonds and your net debt position has been down to almost negligible levels. Can you provide some comments on how you foresee a capital structure will develop going forward?"

One of our key priority is when we announced the merger between Kvaerner and Arker Solutions was of course the build financial robustness. And I think what we have done since then has demonstrated that that is what we are doing and our job is, of course, to continue to deliver good performance on our project and healthy cash flow and there -- by there also gradually improve our financial position. We just recently now in April paid out also the dividend for 2021 to our shareholders.

And that was the last answer to the last question of today's session. So this concludes our First quarter's presentation. So thank you all for joining us today and stay safe.